Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will have ten minutes and Deputy Healy will have five minutes.

If one looked at it on paper, one would say an additional allocation in this budget is very welcome indeed. I want to query some of it, specifically the additional budget in relation to the Traveller initiative, where funding has been increased from €855,000 to €2.2 million. If I am not here at the end to hear the Minister's answer, I will check back on it tomorrow, but in 2015 the National Traveller Partnership budget of €1.2 million came through the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. This year, that funding stream was transferred to the Minister's Department, along with the national network funding, under the scheme to support national organisations, SSNO, which is normally allocated to the Irish Traveller Movement, ITM, the National Traveller Women's Forum and Pavee Point. That was also transferred to the Department of Justice and Equality and is approximately €200,000. This would mean that the difference between what we did have for Traveller initiative funding and what we do have may be made up of a transfer of funds from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government to the Department of Justice and Equality rather than extra funding, because the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government would have spent the €1.2 million on the National Traveller Partnership budget and €200,000 on the National Traveller Women's Forum, the ITM and Pavee Point. Is this increase on paper, or is it a real increase and not just a transfer from one Department to the other? Does it, for example, include funding for local-based national organisations under the National Traveller Partnership, which was previously under the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and has now been transferred to the Department of Justice and Equality? We know there were previous claims of great increases in spending in the area of Traveller funding. For example, it was said that the housing budget was increased to €4.2 million. The Minister could say that is not directly her responsibility, but she is the Minister responsible for equality and Travellers tick all the boxes in suffering extreme inequality in this society. That €4.2 million was lauded as a great step forward in terms of funding for Traveller accommodation, but in fact it was not acknowledged that funding for Traveller accommodation in 2008 was in the region of €40 million. That lack of acknowledgement of what the Department is coming from and going to makes things look good, but in fact they are still very dismal. They still seem to look dismal for Travellers from a spending point of view, and the cuts implemented on the Travelling community during the austerity years were indeed - practically everybody with a heart in them acknowledges this - the most vicious, the deepest and the most heartless that could possibly have been made to any aspect of society. The Travelling community took most of the hits.

I will give a couple of examples of the withdrawal of State funding over the past five years. Inter-agency activities were cut by 100%. I was on the Local Traveller Accommodation Consultative Committee, LTACC, on Dublin City Council for Traveller accommodation, and at the beginning we very much relied on the inter-agency model. Traveller education was cut by 86.6%. One may as well just tell the kids to go home and play on the site, because there is no point in educating them. Traveller accommodation lost 85%, equality lost 76.3% and the Traveller organisations were cut by 63%.

The Minister is probably saying to her officials that this is not her brief, but her brief is equality, and the most vicious, inhuman and cruel of these cuts have deeply increased inequality for Travellers vis-à-visthe rest of society. Travellers tick all the boxes for low life expectancy, low infant mortality rate, poor health and poor educational attainment. The suicide rate among Traveller men is 17 times that of the suicide rate in the rest of the population.

There has been an extraordinary level of disinvestment by the Irish State in the Traveller community. One of the most striking cases is the fact that statutory agencies did not even spend what was allocated to them. In the years when I was on the LTACC, there was a housing underspend of several million euro in a period when Travellers, like the rest of the population, were going through a housing crisis. Many Travellers were in private accommodation and - again, like the rest of the population - lost their accommodation because of soaring rents and ended up in homeless agencies. The underspend on health in that period was 18%. On equality, it was 28% and on accommodation, it was 26%. Much of this may be from the budgets of different Departments but, ultimately, the Minister is responsible for equality and we need to look carefully at what has happened to the Irish Traveller movement, particularly in the years of austerity.

We also need to think about how we are going to address it. How, for example, will we restore special assistants to Traveller children in normal mainstream schools? Two special assistants were cut from a school in Bluebell. They just disappeared because there was no budget for them but the school takes on the bulk of the Traveller population from Ballyfermot and its surrounds. Many of these people end up doing very well but not because the Minister's Department or the Department of Education and Skills are any great help to them. It is because of the dedication of teachers and parents and the determination of the children themselves.

The Cabinet needs to address Traveller accommodation, given the terrible tragedy that happened last winter when five young Travellers lost their lives in a dreadful fire. The State needs to look at this on an equality basis, not on the basis of throwing a few crumbs here and there. It needs to address the deep inequality that exists. Later on in the year, we hope to pursue this by pushing for legislation that recognises Traveller ethnicity and would legally bind the State to deal with them on an equal footing to the rest of the population.

I have a question on the integration, asylum and migration budget. As I understand it, it remains the same as last year, at €1.5 million, but we are supposed to be taking in extra refugees from Syria and war-torn and famine-stricken areas. This does not match up to any commitment we give to asylum seekers coming into the country. There is a slight increase in the immigration budget but that may be just to help the Irish immigration service, run by An Garda Síochána, to process people faster. Does it really deal with delivering a budget that will help us look after the needs of asylum seekers and their families?

These are a couple of things which I find challenging in the Estimates and I would like to hear the Minister's answer to them. I may be moving slightly outside the Minister's brief but she is Minister for Justice and Equality and holistically responsible for all the issues to do with the lives and livelihoods of Travellers. The lack of equality for Travellers ends up on the Minister's lap and we need to address it to stop visiting desperate inequality and tragedy on the Traveller community.

See this speech in context